


McChapel

by theslashbunny (theplotbunny)



Series: Team McCoy: Relationship Origin Stories [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 01:45:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10583826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theplotbunny/pseuds/theslashbunny
Summary: Leonard probably would have met Christine Chapel anyway. Maybe. But Jim certainly does make a good conversation starter.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As some of you know, I was a member of Team McCoy during the 2011 Ship Olympics over at st_respect. For the second event, the prompt was: "Origin Stories. Tell us how your ship came to be." Since we were a multi-ship team, we decided to do a 5+1 format with a different pairing for each section. cookiechris80 wrote the intro and closing, smokiquartz wrote McPike, our captain redtapestry wrote McUhura, and buhnebeest wrote the +1 of McCoy and his daughter. I ended up writing Leonard and Jocelyn, McChapel and McChekov. I'll be posting all three of my origin stories here. If I can find the others, I'd love to link to them here, so I'll see if I can find them on AO3.

Things were never the same once Leonard joined Starfleet. And he hated that phrase, “things were never the same.” They were never the same after his father’s death, they were never the same after his divorce. “Things were never the same” meant bad things for Leonard. Because Leonard had signed up for Starfleet at the last possible minute, at the Academy he was assigned to room with the only other person who went through late registration that year: Jim Kirk. And for the first time in his life, “things were never the same” didn’t sound so bad.

It was surprising how close they became in only three months. Leonard was his usual cantankerous self, but that didn’t seem to faze the younger man at all. When Leonard went to the cafeteria for lunch, Jim would be saving him a seat; when Jim chattered on about school, or women (or men or aliens), or nothing at all, it didn’t matter if Leonard didn’t respond - but he soon found out that when he did, or when he brought up something that he remembered Jim saying, he was rewarded with that bright, megawatt smile that the kid seemed to reserve for his roommate. Neither had many friends, both were usually too busy for relationships of any kind, but in each other they found the best friend they’d never had before.

So they started to spend most of their free time together, studying or bitching about “the infants Starfleet trusted with potentially dangerous medical equipment” or about how difficult it was to finish the Academy in three years (which Leonard still thought was a damn-fool idea, but if anyone could do it, Jim could). Leonard also found himself with the dubious honor of being Jim’s regular physician. Not only did the kid have an uncanny knack for finding trouble, he also had a list of allergies a mile long and as intense aversion to all forms of medical practitioners and treatments. Leonard was quickly fingered as one of the only medical cadets that Jim couldn’t con or seduce, and was the only licensed doctor at Medical who could (and would) match him wit for wit and complaint for complaint without writing the kid up for insubordination.

So the first time Leonard hears the name “Christine Chapel,” it’s in one of his roommate's now-expected rants against the medical profession that come about whenever Jim has to visit Starfleet Medical for a duty-fitness or an injury (course-related or otherwise). Leonard hadn’t been one of the staff assigned to do the duty-fitness physicals, blood work, and vaccines required for the off-world training exercise Jim had been accepted for over Christmas/Winter Break. So, he’d been expecting to hear about the injustices of the Starfleet Medical system once Jim’s appointment came around. He’d worried that Jim would be able to con his way out of some or all of it if Leonard wasn’t there, taking his blood and vitals with gentle, if necessary, force. From the sound of it, the exam had gone remarkably well - at least from a medical standpoint.

“Do you know a Christine Chapel?” Leonard looked up from where he was seated on his bed, reading a medical journal. Normally, he wouldn’t let Jim distract him like this from keeping up with new studies and practices, but it was pretty much a restatement by some two-cent hack of a study that had been reported over a year ago with completely different (and more accurate) results. It could wait - Jim was usually far more entertaining anyway.

“Jim, I don’t assume that you know everyone in the Command track, so why must you continue to assume I know everyone in Medical?” The blond let loose a frustrated sound that seemed more appropriate coming from a teenage girl than a twenty-two year old man and explained that it wasn’t because she was a nurse. It was because she and Bones shared similar “bedside manner - or lack thereof” and were both “equally vicious with hypos.” Now, Jim thinks hyposprays are naturally vicious and usually doesn’t comment to Leonard about it unless he felt personally wronged by the mostly painless jab, usually because of his relationship to the wielder, so... Leonard smirked and looked over again at his roommate sprawled across the other bed, blue eyes pouting in a way only a mouth should be capable of expressing.

“You tried to hit on her, didn’t ya?” 

Jim groaned theatrically and covered his eyes dramatically with his arm.

“That’s another reason I thought you knew her! I swear, you two are the only cadets on campus who both already work at the clinic and who are completely and _disturbingly_ immune to the Kirk Charm.” Leonard’s laughter earned him a glare as the blond continued, the look back on his face that screamed out for sympathy that he just wasn’t going to get. Not from Leonard, anyway. “But I had to try! You should’ve seen her, Bones...”

From there, Kirk’s rant against the healthcare establishment turned into a litany of praises for Nurse Chapel’s beauty interspersed with dejected laments of her sharp tongue and her “unjustified cruelty” to one James T. Kirk that Leonard was powerless to ignore. For some reason, Jim was always far more entertaining when recounting the instances he’d been shot-down than when regaling his various successful exploits. And even though Leonard had never met this Chapel woman, he had a feeling they’d get along like a house on fire.

///

Leonard didn’t get to experience this “stunning blonde beauty with eyes and a heart like ice - I’m telling you, Bones, ICE” for himself until a month and a half later. As it happened, they were both assigned to cover an ER shift on New Years’ Eve. By eleven o’clock, Leonard, and the pretty blonde nurse assigned to the same beds and whose name he hadn’t had a chance to learn yet, treated victims from two separate hovercar accidents (one involving alcohol and earning a tirade from the particularly infuriated Dr. McCoy), a drunken civilian from a bar brawl, and a broken arm, a broken leg, a concussion and a dislocated shoulder from a group of four first-year cadets who thought it’d be fun to climb the Kelvin memorial - while drunk. Those particular morons had earned a lecture from two doctors and three different nurses and a scathing indictment on their permanent Academy records for their insensitivity. So, if by eleven-thirty, Dr. McCoy was jabbing a little harder than strictly necessary on his PADD while typing up his report at the nurses’ station, no one would blame him. Just like he couldn’t blame the nurse who was grumbling at his side, while writing her own report, for her ongoing tirade against holidays that encouraged drunkenness and how New Years’ Eve always seemed to make people even more stupid.

Normally he’d ignore the workplace gossip and bitching that the other nurses and doctors tended to indulge in, preferring instead to stick to job-related discussions - partly because it kept things from getting messy between co-workers. But he had to agree with her concerns for the future of Starfleet, since it was true that they let in a disproportionate amount of people with a distinct lack of self-preservation instincts - a certain Jim Kirk came to mind. And what she added next definitely hit a chord.

“And who tries to hit on the nurse who’s tending to their stupidity-induced injury? What is wrong with these Command cadets? I had one just over a month ago who tried to flirt his way out of his off-world training work-up!” Leonard paused his chart notations. Oh, this was almost too good to be true.

“You wouldn’t happen to be Christine Chapel, would you? I think he mentioned you.” He turned to really look at her, all pale skin, blue eyes and long legs. If she was, Jim had been right - she was absolutely beautiful.

“Lemme guess - you’ve had him as a patient, too, haven’t you?” Christine’s face was nothing but frustrated empathy. His eyebrow rose at the same time that his mouth quirked into a wry smirk.

“Cadet Kirk? I’m his primary physician.”

“My God, you poor man. How do you get anything done?” How, indeed!

“I’m also his roommate, so he can’t get away from me. Though I’d take it as a kindness if you didn’t judge me too harshly for that connection.” As she looked more closely at him, he saw another flash of recognition.

“Ah! So, _you’re_ Leonard McCoy, the man who made Linda Kerr cry last week.” Cry? That little lecture on the safety protocols for laser scalpels made her cry?

“Yes, I am. And it’s not my fault she can’t take criticism. She deserved every word I said.” She snorted, an act that her good humor made far more attractive than it ever should be.

“I’m sure she did; the woman’s incompetent. But that’s also why half of the cadets are terrified of you, half the nurses want to put you over their knees, and the other halves of both want to see just what it would take to get into those pants of yours.”

“Which half are you in?” Leonard had no idea where that came from, but he couldn’t help himself. It was probably Jim’s fault somehow - after all he’d had to listen to the kid sing this woman’s praises (and yes, taking Jim down a peg was a positive skill in his book) for over half an hour just over a month before. She smiled at him.

“Well, shoot. You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?” Damn, she had a nice laugh. “I’m a rare breed - part nurse, part cadet. To find out more than that, you’ll have to buy me a drink first.” She winked at him then, before walking away. But after shift, just before midnight, as Leonard was walking out the lobby doors, she walked up to him, casually slipped her arm through his and asked with a playful smirk on her face, “So, you gonna buy me that drink?”

///

They went out for a drink that night and again the next weekend. They were the only students in their year who managed to test out of half of the medical courses, so they started to study together, sometimes in the library, sometimes quizzing each other during quiet moments in a shared shift. The first time they tried to study in Leonard’s dorm room, Jim spent two hours distracting them from their work, first by explaining that Christine’s presence was proof of a conspiracy, and then by asking inane questions about Christine’s “intentions towards his roommate” and a retelling of their “fateful meeting” on the shuttle from Iowa. But their study sessions began to include Jim, who studied his own work (mostly) quietly or quizzed them both when his genius exempted him from studying too hard. During this time, Leonard and Christine would still go out for drinks after a shift or to celebrate a successful exam, and soon their time together expanded yet again to include movie nights, sometimes with Jim, sometimes without.

Over the spring semester, Leonard did indeed learn a great many things about Christine Chapel. He found out that she was from New Orleans and, fittingly, held her alcohol better than most men. Being from New Orleans, she was a lifelong fan of the Saints and initiated a new tradition between the two of them - a bet every time the Saints played the Falcons, the loser buying a night of drinks for the winner, eventually costing him enough money that Leonard was considering giving up the Falcons for good.

In addition to being beautiful, intelligent, a talented nurse, immune to Jim, competitive, spirited, and generally way out of Leonard’s league, she also reacted in a completely unexpected way to discovering Leonard’s divorce. Instead of trying to comfort him, or rail against the injustice of it all, she just listened to him one night after they’d both had a few too many and did the one thing that could possibly endear her to him more: she asked about Joanna. She wanted to see pictures and hear stories and once she found out that he still got to speak to her twice a month, she’d ask him for updates and laugh and smile and let him enthuse about his little girl as long as he wanted. Oh, he definitely didn’t deserve to have this amazing woman in his life, but he was quickly becoming certain that he would be miserable without her. 

///

Leonard still isn’t sure if he made the first move - afterwards, Christine claimed that he did, while he maintained that she had. One night in May, after the stress of finals was over, while Jim was out of the dorm and miraculously not in need of medical care, Leonard and Christine were watching one of the old 20th century black-and-white thrillers that they’d found a mutual fondness for. Christine got up from the couch to grab another glass of the wine she’d brought over and Leonard spread his arm across the back of the couch while she was gone. When she returned, instead of returning to her previous seat, she sat right next to him, curling up against his side with her feet tucked under her and her knees resting on his thigh.

They also could never agree on who kissed whom. It was just after the movie was over and Christine was helping him clean up as usual. She was about to grab her purse when it just- happened. Suddenly her lips were on his, his hands were on her waist, her fingers were in his hair, and his body was pressing hers up against the wall. It just escalated from there until all that he was really sure of was that she didn’t leave until morning and he was still smiling when Jim got home that afternoon. By the time that it got around the hospital that Dr. McCoy and Nurse Chapel were dating, Leonard knew that things would never be the same - and he wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
